[b]Persephone:[/b]

I should take a moment to talk about how Aevum could let dilapidated buildings stand, unmolested, for years. There’s a gut feeling that space is all about scarce resources and ruthless optimization, an innate bias that recoils against any waste.

The truth is, Aevum has a lot of empty space. Sure, there’s a housing and migrant crisis going, but that’s an issue of privatization, not accommodation. When a nearby station fails - the large ones, anything with a population in the hundreds-of-thousands - it’s not an issue of finding room in Aevum. It’s the process of eminent domain and settlement. Finding the money, and the people willing to take it. 

YIMBY activists have been pushing for keeping public-owned apartment blocks empty in anticipation of disaster housing, and they’ve had some success at it, but almost always only after the crisis has happened. One group, Hotels For Hope, has been running apartments bed-and-breakfast style with volunteer workforces, to donate in times of need. They do good work, but have an obvious conflict of interest where their funding model is mutually exclusive to the service it’s intended to provide. 

Still. While Aevum’s interior surface is only two fifths the Earth’s, it uses that space much more efficiently, and was designed to handle a population of up to twenty billion. An interior handrail of the station, running the ten thousand kilometers of the station’s zero-G core, was wire pulled from the Brooklyn Bridge in what had been New York City. 

When making that bridge, the architect had intended a safety factor of eight. During the building process, a contractor had slipped inferior wire past numerous safety inspections, and of the resulting cables, only five of the tested eighty were sound to specification. Found too late, the bad wire had already been woven into the cables. 

But the design had been so good that the bridge, with its rotten wire, still lasted a hundred and eighty years, right up until New York had been subsumed by the rising waters of the 2060s. Reclaimed, it still exists as a statement, as something you could trust your life on. 

A look into the minds of the people who built this place. 

It’ll be years before it’s worth the cost of restoring a building like Geiger’s Counter, at the earliest. 

This is a safe place. That’s guaranteed. No one knows to look for you here, and nobody’s going to stumble across it by accident. The cost to demolish it safely is more than the land’s worth.

You can’t live here, but you can work here. Throw up your corkboards with the coloured string, connect to the internet, and feel [i]safe[/i] for a while. 

How else have you made this place your own?

[If you want to follow up leads here, you’ve got no relevant specialties. +Clever, try to beat 7. Bigger success means more info, maybe group prep. Following a lead takes an hour - even if you fail at it. You’ve probably got time for two topics before you should start heading home. This will also count for generating new leads.]]


[b]3V:[/b]

If only Proverbs knew what they’d done.

How high do you jump when there’s a knock at the front door? A visitor standing on that balcony overlooking Eden with its liturgy to Moloch. He’s an older man, though not as old as Ferris, closer to his fifties, wearing a pastel-green shirt and khakis that are both three sizes too big for him, generous folds of excess material sloughing down the way wax cools on a candle. 

He gives a dainty wave, then lets himself in. He gestures to the rucksack he’s carrying. “I’m just here to deliver some groceries. I like to be a good neighbour, didn’t think I’d be interrupting anything. Can’t remember the last time Cassandra had guests. I’m Gavin.” He drops the bag on the kitchen counter, and begins sorting and stacking things, putting things away. He clearly knows where it’s all supposed to go. “Is she here?”

He’s smiling, he’s pleasant, but there’s an effort to it. He says ‘neighbour’ but it’s clearly been a long walk for him. What thin, wispy hair he still has is stuck to his scalp, and he doesn’t match Ferris for lean proportions. The walk took a lot out of him, and it wasn’t a casual thing. 

He is completely obvious to the fact you’re being flirted with, right now. Upstairs, there’s the sound of a shower starting. Gavin lets out a breath, but only for a moment before he sucks it back in and looks tense again. "Sorry, am I interrupting something?" he asks. 


[b]November:[/b]

[b]R/W/O:[/b]

Your job, slated after Muffi, was especially requested of you specifically. It’s a delivery job, which is unorthodox - Headpattr charges more than courier service apps. Maybe it makes more sense that the client is Rudolph Merkin. 

Rudy’s overpaying for a delivery of a rare coin - a 17th century Korean [i]mun[/i] seed. Hardly the rarest, but a plausible enough reason to order your services again so soon, a reason for you to end up at his apartment again.

It might be a trap. You could always refuse.